Thanks to the help of users we had a look at goals scored now that superplayers are starting to disappear.
We realized that, although goals seem on a descending pattern, with the disappearing of superkeepers there will be more goals scored. We believe the conversion ratio goals attempt/goals scored is a bit too high, creating results more suitable for a baseball match rather than a football one.
The actual descending pattern anyway does not seem strong enough to bring it to reasonable levels, after all, the game was toned to work well with the existing players at the time.

Now things have changed so we are changing those ratios as well.
We won't change it big time overnight anyway, as we don't want to create damages.
We are starting with:
slight decrease in shots accuracy (leading to less shots on target compared to total shots)
slight increase of goalkeepers effectiveness
We will keep stats monitored for the whole season and if needed tweak values a bit more at the end of next season.

ATTENDANCE IN CALLED OFF MATCHES

There have been talks with users about an unfair situation happening in the game. If one team didn't have enough players to field the game was called off and no attendance money were awarded.
If a team became unmanaged in the middle of a season, half league teams got their gate receipts while the other half didn't, causing an unfair advantage.

For this reason we have changed things this way:
- When a match is called off, the attendance will be calculated as per any other match. Both teams will receive their share of gate receipts.
- Due to the fact that also the incomplete team receives their share of gate receipts, the fine for not fielding a team will change from £300,000 to £500,000 basically nullifying the effect of the higher income.
- Managerless teams will not be fined for fielding incomplete teams so that we won't have teams with huge debts caused by reiterate called off matches.

Please note that in order to allow this, called off matches won't be displayed as they used to (with an *), but you will be able to get to the stats page, although you won't see any line-up. when you see this, combined with the 3-0 result means the opposite team didn't field a team.

MONEY ATTENDANCE BUG DISCOVERED AND SOLVED

We discovered a huge bug that seemed to have been there since before our takeover in the game. Basically for a code error the system was giving 75% of gate receipts both to the home team AND the away team, instead of 75%-25%.
This led to have much more money injected in the game than it should be. Actually 50% more than it should, for every week of the season.
This was a shocking discovery, which has now been corrected.
We expect that the decrease of money injection will be around £ 1 billion per season.

MONEY ATTENDANCE PERCENTAGES

We also changed the percentage of money awarded to teams, as we had many requests for a change from users. It seems the 25% to away teams is too much, and doesn't encourage investments in stadia.
The poll itself showed that 38% of users wish to keep the actual ratio while 62% wish it to be reduced somehow. We decided to calculate an average from users suggestions and the result was that the percentage for league games should be 85% for home teams and 15% for away teams.
Please note also that we allowed a little increase on the maximum attendance at full price tickets.

FORUM, NEWSPAPER AND SOCIAL ITN

ITN forum has received a complete makeover.
A new skin has been added as the old one started to show ageing signs... The new one should look more modern.

ITN Newspaper has been moved from the main site to the Forum. This happens for more than one reason:

- Newspaper will look much better in the forum, as the tool is more efficient, giving the possibility of attaching videos and pictures, adding comments and so on...
- Moving newspaper from the main site will make more database space available and reduce the number of queries in the main site. We wish to use these resources to reactivate the players scouting full feature, as it used to work in the past. This will be looked at during the first weeks of the new season.
- We also hope this will add interest to the forum making it a real ITN social place.

IMPORTANT! Please note we will keep the old Newspaper available for 10-15 days, so that users are able to copy/paste articles they wish to keep in the new Newspaper too. Unfortunately they're coded in different way so we cannot transfer them to the new one.
It is very easy and quick anyway, you only have to copy/paste the whole piece into a new article on the new Newspaper.

And finally ITN Forum has had a new big feature added. It's ITN Social, which is a kind of Social Network all for ITN in which users can add friends, receive notifications, and even have a small chat feature in order to deal in real time with other managers instead of long PM's chains on the main site.

We really hope this brings our game to a new level!

IN ONE SEASON TIME...

We are anticipating the new step into the game reform. This is in order to give you time to plan and know in advance what will happen.

After tuning down hidden attributes, and retire superplayers, it's now time for the third and last step we planned long ago. We believe this will make the game more realistic.In real football players are not all the same, and what is difficult for managers and talent scouts is understanding which player is a talent, as not always it is so blatantly evident.
We think that this will happen also in ITN. Some players are easily recognized, when they have Legendary attributes, some are a bit more hard to find, thanks to the hidden attributes.

From Season 21 attributes won't stop like now at 7.00 (Legendary), but they will allow to be trained more, although the tag will not show more improvements. Therefore a player can go to 7.25 or 7.50 or more, but you will always see him at Legendary.
These attributes will have 2 properties:
1 – These attributes over Legendary will higher wages much more than at lower levels.
2 – These attributes will need training to be kept at the same level, otherwise will decrease at a faster speed compared to lower levels.

The idea behind this is that in real football there are great players, but there are also players that for some time are at a “state of grace” level, when they seem to perform even better than their limits. But if not training or playing perfectly they go back to their normal level.

This will now happen also in ITN, but of course will have a price. Players at their peak ask for big contracts in real football, and a team cannot retain all the best players in the world, as it would cost them too much. The same will happen in ITN, if you want to have a team full of over Legendary players you will need a very large wallet...

The ability of a manager will be understanding when a player is just a normal player, which player is in his best form (but will require more attention to the economic side), which player instead is a “hidden gem” (and will perform like the best players costing less), like it happens in real football.We think this will add a new level, and make it more intriguing for managers.Managers more intuitive and with a good eye for talents will be the ones who succeed!

We want to make it clear one thing anyway as we think there was a bit of confusion on the forum about hidden attributes. They did not disappear, we only toned them down.
As soon as we took over the game we understood that this side of the game went a bit out of hand, and many managers realized this.
There were a couple of players which had hidden attributes so high that they were actually 9 times stronger than a Legendary player. This was insane, and led to normal attributes being almost useless.

Nowadays hidden attributes will higher a player performance to make him match the best players on the game, or even slightly overcome them, but not make him 2, 3, 9 times stronger.
We believe this is realistic, like those real life players who don't seem to be so classy, but with commitment they show a cutting edge that allows them to challenge the best players and sometimes even perform better than them.

MINOR CHANGES

We added a warning message when starting a negotiation for a private deal involving a new manager still in his tutorage period.

New youth promotions from managerless teams who never got a manager (happening at the end of the season) has now been tweaked so that half players will go into the reserves and half into the 1st team, in order to avoid teams having 30 players in one team and 5 in the other, which caused abandoned matches.

This page will be updated often in the news few weeks with new stuff coming, as soon as it's ready to go live. Stay tuned.